Obama’s Robed Radicals

President Obama sent another reminder on Monday about the importance of this fall’s Senate races by resubmitting five judicial nominations so extreme as to be alien to the American experience.

All five nominations were held up for months because not even many Democrats want to go on the record voting for their confirmation. The nominations officially lapsed when the Senate recessed for more than 30 days in August. Rather than letting them die quietly and without embarrassment, the president renominated them – as if to emphasize his utter disdain for the usual American norms of justice.

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The five radical judicial nominees are:

Robert N. Chatigny, a federal district judge from Connecticut, showed bizarre sympathy for a serial rapist-murderer, saying his “sexual sadism” was a “mitigating factor” rather than reason to punish him to the extent of the law. “He’s at Cornell, he had this classmate, this petite Asian girl who is sweet, and he likes her, and he winds up killing her because he has this affliction, this terrible disease,” the judge said in conference. “[It was] this awful, uncontrollable impulse to sexually brutalize this person he liked and then kill her. … Michael Ross may be the least culpable, the least, of the people on death row.” This was no isolated incident. Judge Chatigny imposed sentences well below the recommended minimum in a series of child-pornography and sexual-assault cases and even tried to invalidate Connecticut’s version of the Megan’s Law sex-offender registry.